A Terrible Beauty

to some of the Traveling folk.

'Tomas O Conaill?'

'That wouldn't surprise me. He was always a vicious bastard, and his head was always full of fairy nonsense.'

There was a long silence between them. In the front of the pub, a businessman was shouting on his mobile phone. 'I will, yeah. I did, yeah. I am, yeah.' Eventually Eamonn leaned forward and traced a pattern on top of the varnished table with his well-manicured fingertip.

'The way it was done, you see. The bones all mixed up like that. The knackers do that to stop a person from being admitted to heaven. If you can't find your feet, how can you walk through the pearly gates?'

Katie said, 'I didn't know that you were such an expert on Irish superstitions.'

'I take a very keen interest in anything that's a matter of luck.'

'Well, you'll let me know, won't you, if you hear about anybody whose luck ran out up at Meagher's Farm?'

'I will of course. It's always been my policy to cooperate with the Garda.'

'One day, Eamonn, I promise, I will break you.'

Eamonn gave her a smile. ''You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will?but the scent of the roses will hang round it still.''

She left the pub without touching her glass of water and without saying good-bye. The big silent man with the shaved head followed her to the door and opened it for her.

7

Dr. Reidy called her from theUniversityHospital at 11:25 on Friday morning.

'I'll be finishing my written report over the weekend, Detective Superintendent. But I think you ought to come over to the path lab so that I can give you some preliminary findings. Which will surprise you.'

'Surprise me? Why?' asked Katie, but he had already banged down the phone.

Liam drove her to the hospital. It was a gray day, dry, and not particularly chilly, but with low clouds pouring endlessly over the city from the west. One of those days when you could easily imagine that you would never see the sun again, for the rest of your life.

She didn't need an overcoat: just her prune-colored wool suit with the red speckles and a cream-colored rollneck sweater. Liam wore his new black leather jacket.

Liam said, 'There's no doubt about it, so far as I'm concerned. Whichever way you look at it, Michael Meagherhadto know that the bodies were buried under his feed store. I know that Mrs. Meagher plays down his republican connections, but it's totally possible that he never told her what he was doing, most of the time.'

'Eugene O Beara denied any knowledge, though, didn't he?'

'He did, yes, but that was hardly the surprise of the century.'

They parked at the front of the hospital and Katie led the way through the double swing doors and along the corridor to the pathology laboratory. An old man in a plaid dressing gown sat in a wheelchair at the end of the corridor, and frowned at her through glasses that were so fingerprinted that they were almost opaque. He looked the spitting double of Samuel Beckett, but if you had said to him 'nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!' he might very well have agreed with you but he wouldn't have known that it came fromWaiting for Godot.

Dr. Reidy was standing at the far end of the pathology laboratory wrapped in a green plastic apron. The pearly gray light from the clerestory windows lent him a halo. Eleven trestle tables were arranged in two lines, each table draped in a dark green sheet, and on each table lay a collection of bones, with paper labels attached to every one of them. When Katie saw them like this, she thought they looked even more vulnerable and pathetic than they had when she had first seen them up at Meagher's Farm, a family of fleshless orphans. She felt a sense of desperate sadness, not least because it was far too late to do anything to save them.

Three laboratory assistants were still carefully sorting through the bones, trying to reassemble the skeletons into their previous selves. They were using a wall chart with eleven skeletal diagrams on it to chart their progress.

Dr. Reidy blew his nose into a large white handkerchief. 'We have identified most of the component parts of these unfortunate individuals-and, yes, they were all female, of varying ages. I will be giving you a list of the bones that are still missing so that you can send your officers back up to Meagher's Farm to search with rather more diligence than they obviously did before. I will attach drawings of what each particular bone looks like. I don't have any optimism that any of your officers can tell their coccyx from their humerus.'

'You mean their arse from their elbow,' said Katie, without smiling.

'Quite, Detective Superintendent. What an anatomist you are.'

Katie walked around the nearest table and looked at the skull lying forlornly at one end, its bones arranged beneath it. 'You said you had a surprise for me, Doctor.'

'That's right. Not an unpleasant surprise, you'll be happy to know. I've made some preliminary tests on these bones and I can tell you with absolute certainty that none of these ladies died in your lifetime?or evenmylifetime, so we can forget about Operation Trace. All the marrow's decayed but I should be able to retrieve some identifiable DNA. I've also sent some bone samples off toDublin for full amino-acid racemization and when I get the results back I should be able to give you a much more accurate date. But you'll probably be relieved to know that you're not looking for a murderer who's likely to be still alive today.'

'You're sure they were murdered?'

'I think it's ninety-nine percent likely but not totally certain. Apart from the holes drilled in the top of the femurs, and the doll figures attached, each had a narrow chisel-like object pushed into both eye sockets. Each was obviously dismembered, but it won't be possible for me to determine whether this process began before or after